Anxiety and Photography

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I have always oddly been drawn to the subject of death, from skulls to war photography. I have a phase wanting to become a war phtogorapher, but i doubt i would have coped with what I saw. My favourite photographers all dealth with very intense subjects, from Diane Arbus to Kevin Carter and Don McCullen. This is problably where my idea of photographing grief came from, It’s interesting the things that we go through to deal with a death. Just because you have experienced one before does not mean that you know how to cope with another. Every death is different and so is the way we deal with it, With my Mom i actually do not really remember the time after she died, I only remember attempting to go back to college and not coping. Then when my Dad passed i remember being completely numb, finding him there in the morning had shocked me and I dont think i knew how to process it. I remember being at the funeral, not really believing that he was gone, but the eulogist mentioned that he had spent many years with my mom and it was this comment that hit me the hardest, I realised they were both gone at that point. It was that moment that life changed, all those little things i took for granted I now had to learn to do for myself. I was 17 with very little knowledge of cooking, washing clothes or in fact just the outside world, i’d lived in my own ignorant teen bubble and all of a sudden it was time to grow up. I burnt a lot of food, shrank and dyed my fair share of clothing, found out what side I should iron printed clothing, how to (badly) sew holes in clothing and how mind numbingly boring food shopping alone is. Luckily I had a wonderful family that supplied a strong support network to help me learn these things, you always think parents teach you whilst you are young and then you fly the nest, it’s not until a time like this that you realise you learn from them throughout you’re entire life.